What goes on in an actor's brain?
I was recently fortunate enough to be cast as the American abstract expressionist painter Mark Rothko in a production of John Logan's play "Red". The short run--just two performances--finished a few days ago and I'm still in the wind-down state from inhabiting such an intense character, which is a process that takes some time.
Mark Rothko was one of a group of painters that included people like Jackson Pollock and Barrett Newman, who will be familiar to Canadians as the creator of "Voice of Fire", the "three vertical stripes" painting the National Gallery paid $2 million for in the '80s, to much public outrage, and recently sold for $73 million to much curatorial smugness. These painters were trying to find ways to express universals (abstractions) in their work in ways that could not be captured by traditional representational forms. They were also profoundly damaged individuals who had been variously brutalized by the events of the first half of the 20th century, Rothko perhaps more than most.
The play is a fictionalized look at Rothko's historical peak in the late '50s: he took a commission to produce a series of murals for the Four Seasons restaurant in the new Seagram Building on Park Avenue in New York City. After dining at the restaurant and realizing what a hostile environment it would be for his art, he returned the very substantial fee and kept the paintings, which now hang in the Tate Gallery in London. Once he had found a home for them at the Tate--ten years after the events of the play--he killed himself, which in the play is presaged by his interactions with an imagined assistant, Ken, who was very capably played by my friend Ray Appel.
Like most actors in North America, my training has focused on inhabiting the mind of the character, and "becoming another person" to the greatest extent possible. This is a fascinating and difficult process, but for someone born on the autism spectrum it has allowed me to emulate neurotypical behaviour far more effectively than would otherwise have been possible. I credit no small part of what success I've had in life to encountering acting early on. Training as an actor gave me skills to cope with neurotypical reality that have been invaluable, and over the past decade I've furthered that early experience with additional training and performance, both in scripted theatre and improv, which has helped improve my life a great deal. I am not alone in this.
But what is going on when we act?
There has to date been only one fMRI study of actors in character, inevitably at McMaster University, the ageing hippie aunt of Canadian academia. fMRI uses magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to map transient changes of blood-flow in the brain, which allows researchers to take a functional (f) snapshot of the mind in action.
The study looked at a small group of acting students who answered questions as themselves, answered them about a character in the third person, as the character, and as themselves but with a British accent. The characters were Romeo (for males) and Juliet (for females). All subjects had studied the plays previously and memorized the balcony scene. The questions were things like "Would you go to a party you weren't invited to?"
The results are intriguing:
The imaging results showed that acting led to deactivations in brain areas involved in self processing, with a focus on the dmPFC/SFG and vmPFC. This might suggest that acting, as neurocognitive phenomenon, is a suppression of self processing. The major increase in activation associated with role change was seen in the posterior part of the precuneus. Perhaps the most surprising finding of the study was that the British accent condition—during which the participants were instructed to maintain their self-identity—showed a similar deactivation pattern vis-à-vis the self that acting did, suggesting that gestural mimicry of even a completely unspecified other has an impact on brain areas involved in self processing. This supports the contention of acting theorists that gestural and psychological approaches might be related paths towards achieving the same goal, namely the embodied portrayal of a character. It also lends support to theories of embodied cognition, which argue that a change in gestural expression can influence the way that people think and the emotions that they feel.
The first big result is that deactivation of the brain areas involved in self-awareness is an important part of being in character, although they are not entirely suppressed.
The precuneus, which is implicated in self-awareness, has increased activation while in character, although curiously not at quite the same location as when engaged in self-awareness. This may be a signature of the dual consciousness actors and improvisors experience, where we are both the character and ourselves playing the character. At an outdoor festival with a somewhat awkward stage and an audience strewn around the grass at random, part of me was often aware of how to adjust blocking to ensure people were getting a decent view of the action. At other times, in the moments of high emotion, if you'd asked who I was I would have answered, "Rothko." Insofar as I was self-aware at all, I was a passenger, listening as Rothko spoke and moved through me.
We only have so much brain, and it can only do so many things at once, and being ourselves takes up most of our brain most of the time. A necessary implication of this is that the deeper we are in character, the less we can be ourselves. It's fun.
The British accent experimental results are especially interesting, because they showed a largely similar pattern of deactivation as being in character. This supports ideas of embodied intelligence that have for a long time been waiting to take over from the (frankly ridiculous) Cartesian dualism that distorts so much Western thinking about the mind.
As it happened, the same day our performance of "Red" opened I taught an improv workshop at the same festival, and one of the exercises I had students do was "leading with a body part", which is a character development technique used when you've got no idea what character you need to be. You choose a part of your body and focus on it, keeping it as much as possible as the focus of your awareness as you move. Curiously and more-or-less inevitably, a character will grow out of this focus.
Different characters have different physicality, and I've found in my own work that playing with how I stand and move can deepen the sense of being another person a great deal. The neuroscience of this process is still in its early days, but it'll be fascinating to see what we learn. For now, I'll rest on what my wife told me after the opening show: "There were times I didn't recognize you up there. It was like watching someone else." Did ever an actor hear sweeter words?
The Neuroscience of Acting
Coming to this a bit late. It makes sense of the acting school notion of “getting out of your own way.” As for accents, I was saying to an actor friend the other day, of acting, that “as long as I can do a bad accent, I’m fine.”
I don't know much neuroscience, so this was very interesting to me. I'm glad to see you were able to get a jab in there at Cartesian dualism. The way that data is handled in discussions of this never ceases to amaze me with its imagination.